How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

https://hackernoon.com/how-eve-unifies-your-entire-programming-stack-900ca80c58a7

by tbatchelli • 10 years ago

188 106 10 years ago

tedajax• 10 years ago

Yeah until I really see some practical applications written in Eve I don't think I'm ever going to really get it. It's nothing against Eve, it might be great, but nothing I've seen about it so far as really captured my imagination and I'm wondering if I'm just missing something.

ibdknox2• 10 years ago

[Eve member]

Out of curiosity, what would you classify as a practical application? We're looking for some interesting examples to build to help show Eve to folks.

EDIT:

For instance, one of the examples we're throwing together now is an app that a food truck owner could use to put up their menu, manage a queue of orders (in person and online), alert people when their order is ready, accept payments, and post to social media. We picked this because it's an app trucks could actually use and it has lots of "real" functionality in it - from stripe integration to social media posting. Also, who doesn't love food trucks? :)

ilostmykeys2• 10 years ago

Why don't you just make that app for iOS/Android and let food truck owners download it? I know that is a useless thing to suggest given your intent but I think it's equally useless for food truck owners to want to build their own app. There must be a better range of use cases.

eropple• 10 years ago

Example apps are great. But what those example apps are, and what they mean, can vary a lot. Some things that would help, for me:

- Exhaustive inline documentation. Like, consider literate-programming as a model. I want to see thoughts, observations, etc. as I read through the code. I want to know how you think somebody should be thinking. I want notes around "well, because of the way the stdlib works this is O(n^3) when it could be O(n^2), but it's okay for our values of n, we can come back to this." Show me not just what's good, but what kinda isn't but is made up for by other stuff being awesome. Show me where the bodies are buried. Because otherwise, sticking to stacks where I already know and can risk-assess against is a better use of my time.

- Deployment advice. This doesn't mean "throw it in a Docker container", because that's not showing a grasp of the tools around you, but rather, say, open-ended integration with AWS, or Google, or whatever. Show me best practices for configuring it, as I already can see with Rails. And, as above, explain the thinking, explain the value of it, discuss alternatives and why you didn't go that route.

Ultimately, I want to see that whatever tools that I would move to next (I use Ruby for devops-type tasks and Dropwizard for the web) to demonstrate that the developers are intensely thoughtful about the people using their systems, rather than just technology.

HTH.

segmondy• 10 years ago

That's a good example that shows the capability, but complete apps like that have been built with scheme, haskell, lisp, prolog, smalltalk, etc. I think what the original poster is asking tho they most likely won't admit it, is for a runaway profitable app. Once you have an app built with this that get's popular with millions of users or makes tons of money then people take it serious. The app you plan on throwing together is more than enough. If this works as has been written, it would become the secret weapon of the smart programmers.

wilde• 10 years ago

A basic PDF reader?

gpsx• 10 years ago

Example apps are great, but you could just use it for real software. That makes the best examples.

fit2rule• 10 years ago

Also, who doesn't love food trucks?

Europeans. Please add a Döner- or Würstel- stand model.

MrQuincle• 10 years ago

I would be interested in any application that crosses many layers. If you create an IoT device you need:

+ bootloader

+ radio stack

+ HAL

+ custom code layer, say Arduino

+ communication layer

+ mesh hub (+ mesh communication layer)

+ sink code on mobile (bridge, no access to encrypted data)

+ local communication on mobile (low latency)

+ cloud

+ remote access

+ interfaces, mobile/dashboards

It has also a lot of crosscutting concerns: latency, scalability (keep it local stupid), bandwidth, security, safety. Till out in the field: how to remotely define if it is hardware or software to reduce number of devices that gets returned.

nekopa• 10 years ago

My suggestion would be to implement TeX.

It's non trivial, and the whole program is available in book form as a literate program.

Liron8• 10 years ago

Author here. I certainly understand that seeing progressively more sophisticated practical applications will help people "get" Eve. I look forward to that myself.

In the meantime, I hope I can show a "plausibility argument" for Eve's potential by pointing to areas where the status quo of mainstream programming is visibly less than ideal. Uniformity of data formats and operations across the programming stack is one such area.

bsaul• 10 years ago

This article got me curious about eve. Now i think you need to find your "killer use case".

Ror had none, because it was doing what everything else was doing, just faster. But a successful business used it so people got interested.

Node.js first demonstrated chat server

Angular.js showed two way binding of dom to data using declarative syntax

React had those crazy dom update benchmark.

Golang showed various pattern for synchronizing using channels. The "hello world" of go was a chat server.

Etc.. now all those tech had many other great feature. But you need to find one single killer concrete example for the tech, that it performs an order of magnitude better / simpler / faster / safer than any other.

Also, never ever forget runtime speed benchmark. You don't need to be the best, just not catastrophicaly bad.

skybrian• 10 years ago

The part I'm most skeptical of is Eve's universal use of set-based semantics, whether it's needed or not. It seems like making sets and single values look different in the code would be more understandable than making everything look the same. Treating them as different types might be a good way to catch errors, too.

But SQL is very successful so maybe they'll do okay anyway.

Liron8• 10 years ago

You can kinda roll your own "single value type":

  search
    a = [#singleton]  
    b = [#singleton]  
    a != b

  commit @error
    [#error #description: "Multiple values for singleton!"]

I'm sure that's not the actual pattern you'll be using. My point is only that Eve provides a solid low-level foundation to implement higher-level patterns like a single-value type.

daveguy• 10 years ago

"My point is only that Eve provides a solid low-level foundation to implement higher-level patterns like a single-value type."

That's the problem. As long as single-value type is a higher level abstraction you are going in the opposite direction from "programming for everyone".

miguelrochefort6• 10 years ago

This is actually the most elegant aspect of Eve.

You're always working with an abstract/fuzzy value that represents all possible values given some constraints, and only have to resolve a concrete instance when you absolutely need to. More often than not, were working with ordered sets, not single elements.

mamcx• 10 years ago

Yes. I'm with the idea of a relational language, and I "discover" the same idea. In most languages,the scalar is the default and the collection is the special case. However, more often than not, you want to operate in collections than scalar.

So, I have find that this kind of code make sense:

    for i in 1:
        print i

This help to generalize a lot of things.

velox_io• 10 years ago

My startup Velox.io (https://velox.io, which is looking to go live in the next couple of months) is working on the same issue. Right now writing code is overly verbose (and often brittle). The author does make some good points around unifying API, Database and Application code. Most code is centred about moving data from A-B, with some logic applied to it.

Eve done some interesting stuff, as has Linq from .net, AWS's Lambda's, even Kx's Q in the way it handles temporal data.

My hypothesis that writing software can be greatly improved; There is a lack of programmers, yet most people are capable of creating spreadsheets (and writing formulas). Using spreadsheet is similar to programming, what makes programming much more complex is the different systems involved and lack of rapid feedback.

People have been trying to make programming easier/ accessible since the days of Hypercard, but no one has really cracked yet.

Edit: Downvote if you will (I've spent years on this), at least write a comment to say why.

sly010• 10 years ago

People have been trying to make programming easier/ accessible since the days of Hypercard, but no one has really cracked yet.

There is no shortage of good programming languages and useful paradigms. The problem is how to interface with existing systems written in a different language with a very different mindset (e.g. your operating system). Someone has to write code to bridge those abstractions, and that only happens if enough resources are concentrated at the right place.

otabdeveloper• 10 years ago

yet most people are capable of creating spreadsheets (and writing formulas)

Not in my experience.

frankquist• 10 years ago

Is that true though? To me, the difference between a simple spreadsheet and say, a floppy bird, is that the spreadsheet requires one to know about rows and columns, and basic math (sum, average). It's a pretty simple abstraction that matches, say, a sheet of paper with a list scribbled on it.

Whereas, say, flappy bird, requires you to think about a lot of other abstractions one is less familiar with, and juggle those. User input, graphics. I think it's the complexity of abstraction and the difficulty of reasoning about it and juggling all the bits in your head, that makes it hard. I think that's a skill you really have to have or learn. Just because some people van add two cells doesn't mean they can easily create their own abstractions f.ex

dkarapetyan2• 10 years ago

How does one package and deploy an Eve application to some cloud infrastructure for example?

cmontella5• 10 years ago

[Eve member]

That's in the PR pipeline right now, you can track it here: https://github.com/witheve/Eve/pull/571

Although I should mention, Eve is super early Alpha right now, so don't deploy anything you will be depending on!

dkarapetyan2• 10 years ago

Cool. Good to know it is in the pipeline.

dicedog• 10 years ago

I'm excited for Eve and next-gen programming languages but as details emerge, it seems like it could easily have been a few libraries and an architecture pattern in most other functional programming languages. When I first learn about things like the continuation monad or CQRS, I have similar reinvent-the-world fantasies but it's often sufficient to expand my toolkit and change my style (in full disclojure ;-), my default language is clojure/script)

Liron8• 10 years ago

I think your point is valid in general, but Eve's semantics are deeply rooted in Logic Programming. IMO that's a more fundamental change than what we can hope to get from layering a pattern/library/architecture on top of an existing database or programming language.

wruza• 10 years ago

Just seems like it sells poor man's Prolog as a "fundamental change". Anyone to dismiss my confusion?

I mean, you can throw HTML around cobol/io/cl/sql/sed with the same wow-effect?

pron2• 10 years ago

but Eve's semantics are deeply rooted in Logic Programming

... and synchronous programming. Eve is a synchronous relational (or logic) language.

sriram_malhar• 10 years ago

Eve is a nicely engineered environment and has basic relational semantics that many streaming query frammeworks and dataflow frameworks have in mind (select with aggregation, update)

But the site doesn't have any discussion of the language's semantics. I know they have mentioned Bloom (bloom-lang.org) as one of their influences. I would like to know how the Eve evaluator handles negation (and what negation means in an Eve context), whether there is a guarantee that a single tick's evaluation will terminate, whether the evaluation is incremental, and whether in doing so, the results are equivalent to a simple evaluator that does not work incrementally (looks at the entire database every time). etc.

erichocean2• 10 years ago

Can Eve call into C without any overhead?

If it can't, then "your entire programming stack" is excluding the kernel and a lot of existing libraries/code.

GavinMcG2• 10 years ago

Why does it need to be without overhead in order to be accurate that it unifies the entire stack?

erichocean2• 10 years ago

Because to qualify as "the entire stack", you need to be able to talk to the kernel efficiently, which in practice means: call into C without overhead.

I have no problem with what Eve is doing, but it's not "the entire stack" and with Eve's paradigm, never will be. And that's okay—just stop calling it "the entire stack".

lj3• 10 years ago

The whole thing is written in javascript and typescript, so my guess is no.

miguelrochefort6• 10 years ago

I've been looking for the holy-grail for years (TodoMVC being my benchmark), and Eve takes the cake.

I'm looking forward to compatibility with semantic Web technologies.

klibertp4• 10 years ago

Eve is the culmination of years of research and development by the visionary team who previously founded Light Table.

...and then abandoned it after getting me excited about a possible Emacs replacement...

buovjaga• 10 years ago

Still being developed, though: https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable

klibertp4• 10 years ago

They had 2 Pull Requests last month, closed 6 tickets and created 4 new tickets. To quote the "Pulse" section:

Excluding merges, 2 authors have pushed 2 commits to master and 2 commits to all branches. On master, 4 files have changed and there have been 64 additions and 15 deletions.

This is not the kind of activity I'd expect in the project under active development. Compare to Emacs[1]:

Excluding merges, 39 authors have pushed 227 commits to master and 260 commits to all branches. On master, 352 files have changed and there have been 6,143 additions and 3,732 deletions.

...and that's Emacs main repo, excluding all the development happening in plugins.

But well, that's actually not that important; what matters is that LightTable badly needs a serious refactoring, because reportedly there is just one person who actually understands the codebase (and it's Chris). Such refactoring is not going to happen, though, because people who actually could do it abandoned the project.

Perhaps it's not even a refactoring that's needed, but a rewrite. Even if using the same language - ClojureScript - the project would be supposedly written in a totally different way due to the changes in the ecosystem. Switching languages would require an immense amount of careful weighing of pros and cons, but it may be worth considering.

Still, this is not going to happen, the code and effort that went into LT are essentially wasted now, possibly with the exception of the learning experience for the authors.

I'm writing this much about it because I really hoped LT to be a modern incarnation of Emacs, as the latter was starting to show its age. Instead, however, LT is dead. On the other hand Emacs got embeddable xwidgets in the last release - which means that (in time, it's not very usable as-is) we will get the in-buffer, full web browser.

[1] https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/pulse/monthly

worldsayshi• 10 years ago

Didn't it influence atom and sublime text 2 quite a bit though?

sua_3000• 10 years ago

I feel like reconciling the divide between the client/server relationship is the next major opportunity for abstraction

Liron8• 10 years ago

Eve helps do that - not in the current version (0.2), but soon your application will be able to interface with a remote server the same way it interfaces with its in-memory data and functions.

quantumpotato_• 10 years ago

I'm impressed with the abstractions! What are recommended "Learn Eve" tutorials?

cmontella5• 10 years ago

Not too many tutorials out yet, since Eve is a brand new language, but we have a quick start tutorial and lots of examples at play.witheve.com

zubairq2• 10 years ago

https://github.com/zubairq/Eve/tree/master/tutorial

zubairq2• 10 years ago

You could also try this Eve tutorial. A developer from Spotify made it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJpBYow99Ag

dajohnson89• 10 years ago

Seems cool

tharibo• 10 years ago

Title : "your entire programming stack".

I feel sad when I find that web programmers think there are only web stacks and "programming" refers only to web programming.

It is not entirely the case here, but the description of "a core system" as :

- Database layer

- Remote API layer

- Application layer

made me tick.

vardump• 10 years ago

Always watch out for using word always.

Never say never.

pjmlp5• 10 years ago

Same here when they refer to front-end as a synonym for Web UIs, as if there wasn't quite a few of us doing 100% native UIs.

k__4• 10 years ago

how much percent of front-end devs do 'only' native UIs?

I mean even most of the mobile people were web devs once...

bertan• 10 years ago

Eve aims to be a general purpose language [1] to really replace your "entire programming stack" except for high performance, real-time applications. So, don't be sad :)

[1] http://witheve.com/deepdives/whateveis.html

Liron8• 10 years ago

Yeah, this concern crossed my mind when writing the post.

Did you have a specific alternate "core system" you'd prefer I had written about?

tonyjstark• 10 years ago

After all these promising presentations and blog entries about what thoughts went into Eve, I'm a bit dissapointed by the result. Or I'm ignorant and don't get it (yet?). Sure, it utilizes literate programming and it abstracts a lot away but it does not seem as revolutionary as the communication around it suggested. Maybe the next articles in this series will enlighten me.

miguelrochefort6• 10 years ago

The big takeaway is not literal programming but logic programming and pattern matching.

dansingerman• 10 years ago

Not convinced either way whether having the same interface for all of the stack is a good idea or not, but it did remind me of Joel Spolsky's blog post on leaky abstractions http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

Liron8• 10 years ago

Man, if Joel were blogging today he'd be dominating the HN front page...

The thing is, Eve isn't an abstraction layer over your existing layers, it's a set of choices you can make layer-by-layer to swap out the old "unique" way of doing things with Eve's more uniform way of doing things. The unique way was arbitrary anyway.

Like, if the whole world all decided to start speaking Esperanto, that wouldn't create too much of a leaky-abstraction issue.

The one issue I can see is how to scale when you use it as your database layer and make fancy queries. But every database's query engine has its own implementation challenges and I don't think Eve is special in that sense.

0x013• 10 years ago

I was keeping a close eye on Eve until it changed direction from programming for everyone to yet another lisp. Is there any writeup/discussion on why this happened?

I do like learning about mind-expanding languages, and something resonated with me when the CardWiki interface was revealed. I get that this language is very 'human readable' but at the end of the day if I want to read or write it I will actually have to put a lot of time into learning it.

I'm already suffering decision paralysis with my current language shortlist and this language doesn't make the cut. The card wiki was innovative, like LightTable. To me, this is 'just a language'. I realised you moved away from the wiki idea for a reason but is putting a GUI on the language still on the roadmap?

jononor6• 10 years ago

Its less the direction changing than the plan for how to get there. The major pieces to the roadmap is now: 1. Eve: Programming designed for humans (current) 2. Eve: Computation for all 3. Eve: The world scale computer

http://www.chris-granger.com/2016/07/21/two-years-of-eve/ has some information on why. Selected quotes: "We learned with Light Table that we can't just slap a UI onto Javascript and expect it to work; the platform has to allow for the representation." "Another reason the platform is necessary is really counterintuitive: we need developers to like it before end users will. Technology diffuses from technical people to non-technical people over time."

0x013• 10 years ago

Thanks for this. I've read that post before, and back then I just took the explanation to mean we're dropping the UI. I can see now that was not the meaning.

we need developers to like it before end users will

While I can see how there is some separation of concerns as mentioned in that post, I think the above quote doesn't have to be true in order for Eve to succeed. It has the potential to contradict the whole programming designed for humans line. Developers can be quite happy with some pretty funky syntax/abstractions which won't seem remotely obvious/intuitive to non-programmers. If developers' considerations are put before non-programmers, Eve might end up a language for developers, as opposed to the intended audience. Personally I think that means that you can't drop the UI even for now. It has to be the only interface. Otherwise you won't get the interest from non-programmers. What developers might like and grok, non-developers might not.

Just one data point from somebody interested in this sort of thing.

tom_mellior4• 10 years ago

I get that this language is very 'human readable'

I wonder why people say/think that. The language uses sigils like @ and #. Sigils automatically make a language non-"human readable" since they have no "human meaning". And no, "you just have to learn the meaning of the language constructs and then you can read it" is not "human readable" in a useful sense. From what I gather, in Eve the @ sign refers to databases. That's fine, but "database foo" is human readable in a sense that "@foo" certainly isn't.

Or look at this example from http://play.witheve.com/#/examples/todomvc.eve

    search
      [#app filter]
    
      all-checked = if not([#todo completed: false]) then true
                    else false
    
      none-checked = if [#todo completed: true] then false
                      else true
    
      todo-count = if c = count[given: [#todo completed: false]] then c
                    else 0

Why aren't these just

    all-checked = [#todo completed: true]
    none-checked = [#todo completed: false]

? Is the triple negation relevant? What is #todo? Is there some sort of implicit iteration over the database where #todo is bound to successive entries? If so, how are the individual flags combined to really arrive at an "all checked" or "none checked" value?

I know plenty of languages that are more "human readable" than this.

It might still be a nice language once you learned it. But this, too, won't be the holy grail of "programming for non-programmers".

jononor6• 10 years ago

#todo is shorthand for [ tag: 'todo' ]. A record can have multiple tags. Agreed that there should be a full-form for database, not just @.

themgt• 10 years ago

Yeah that's awful. In Ruby it'd be like:

  all_checked = todo.select(&:completed?)
  none_checked = todo.reject(&:completed?)
  todo_count = todo.count(&:completed?)

jononor6• 10 years ago

Eve is based on pattern-matching and is set-oriented. So

  all-checked = [#todo completed: true]

would match each of the records with both topic: 'todo' and completed: true. And the following commit block would once per matching record. But what is desired here is one value for all the matching records (an "aggregate" in Eve lingo).

Personally I think we would be much better off with a dedicated aggregate function instead of using if/else here. And count (which is an aggregate function), should have a default value for when no records match. Then could get rid of the if/else there also, and have something like:

  all-checked = all[#todo completed: true]
  none-checked = none[#todo completed: true]
  todo-count = count[given: [#todo completed: false], default: 0]

Disclaimer: I'm just an Eve user/contributor

0x013• 10 years ago

maybe I should have said supposed to be human readable. I share your sentiment. I saw a comment on here once justifying that claim by saying something along the lines of "but if you look at the text and ignore the symbols you get the gist", which is not the original promise of Eve in my opinion [0]

Edit: found the source: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12819973

bpicolo• 10 years ago

Yeah, this is my big complaint. It almost seems like it's less understandable to make the whole literate programming bit relevant.

Imo, literate programming should be solved by more expressive languages, not prose commentary layered on top.

miguelrochefort6• 10 years ago

It should not take you more than 1h to learn Eve...

cmontella5• 10 years ago

I just wanted to respond to your comment, even though I see you posted later in this thread that you re-read Chris' post in a different light.

In developing Eve, we faced a problem of getting involved in too many research projects. How do you make a new language and a new interface to that language at the same time? It was very hard, and in the end we realized it was a mistake to take this route. For instance, how do you version control and make unit tests for a card wiki UI?

Instead, we are developing the language first, getting that to a point where it's stable, well defined, and actually used by people. In order to do this, we needed an interface that was also well understood and defined, and the only choice there really is a textual syntax. This has several benefits:

1: we know how to make a textual interface. We've made many, and there really aren't too many questions there.

2: people know how to use textual interfaces and there are tons of tools out there to work with them

3: developers in particular, the people who will be using our language first, are comfortable with textual interfaces

4: we can still provide some innovation here, and make Eve exciting to work with for the people who want to use it this way.

The obvious drawback is that we're not making a huge leap in programming interfaces this way. But that's okay, since we're making progress in another direction that really is a prerequisite to bringing computation to everyone. When Eve the platform is better understood, we'll tackle the even bigger hurdle of an interface that appeals to more than just developers.

z3t4• 10 years ago

I'm glad there are people rethinking how we develop programs. But as a web developer, the examples in Eve looks more complex then a naive implementation using vanilla CSS, HTML and JavaScript would look like, for example, how do you make something 10 pixels wider in Eve ?

jononor6• 10 years ago

Click the inspector wand on the UI element you want to change, this will move the editor to the Eve block which created it. In TodoMVC the styling is handled with a CSS file, so you go to change it there. Or you add an inline override. The @browser database is a very thin wrapper around DOM/HTML, ala React/JSX.

Cozumel• 10 years ago

Another 'solution' to non-existent problems.

How Eve unifies your entire programming stack

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